Power

Holding Both

I read a version of the same essay about once a week now. A writer I’d otherwise stand next to opens somewhere reasonable: the work was taken without anyone’s consent, or the disclosure rules are a polite fiction nobody enforces, or the people getting rich off this are awfully casual about where the thing they’re renting out came from. Good points. The kind I’ve spent my own essays making. Then, somewhere around the third paragraph, the temperature spikes. The data centers are draining the rivers. The billionaires want to own your thoughts and sell them back to you. To hell with all of them. By the last line the writer has said one true thing and six furious ones, and welded them together so tightly I can’t pry the true one loose. I close the tab agreeing with less than I did when I opened it.